The present invention relates to integrated circuit design, and more particularly to integrating a custom prototyping board with one or more FPGA devices to form an emulation system.
FIG. 1 depicts a conventional system that can support co-simulation and co-emulation using FPGA devices. However, the FPGA device and boards are disposed in a closed vendor proprietary system. Therefore, users can not use or design their own FPGA-based prototyping boards in the system of FIG. 1.
System-on-chip (SoC) design verification requires both software and hardware to work together on a prototype board. A custom-built prototype board having integrated software and hardware provides a simple way to verify a design but due its lack of controllability and observability, it has a limited capability in isolating root causes of design defects.
What is needed is a design verification methodology capable of operating with a custom-made prototype board to verify a circuit design in a co-simulation or co-emulation mode.